Symbols of Purity

Check out this interview with Jane Kramer in the New Yorker. She says some things that it would be good to see said more often, by more people, more forthrightly.

But in France, with all its freedoms, so many young women seem to be capitulating to Islamist pressure. It usually starts with the young men who are recruited, and the symbols of successful recruitment are the women in the family. In other words, the women are the symbol of the new identity of the man. When you see a twelve-year-old girl coming to school in a chador, where for two or three generations no one had worn one, you have to look at this as the expression of an enormous pressure from the men in the girl’s family. You’re really dealing with a born-again movement, and the girls get the short end of the stick, because the boys don’t have to change what they study, how they dress, and so forth. The girls are the proof of the new purity of the family.

Just so. The boys get to go right on dressing as they like, the girls have to turn themslves into symbols. As usual – yawn yawn, same old same old. Men are people, women are things; men get to have autonomy, women don’t; men apply pressure, women become symbols.

Homa Arjomand is in Victoria today to give a speech against the introduction of Sharia law in Ontario. I hope she gets a huge turnout and a lot of press coverage.

Come on, Ophelia, it just isn’t so because Jane tells you it is so. In Europe – there is no sizeable Islamist movement. They are shouting harder but that doesn’t mean they are with more. In fact – they shout harder because they know they are with less.

Maybe, specifically in France, it´s just a fashion statement – a head scarf on top of coming in handy can be quite beuatiful you know.

Where is the stigmatizing going to end? Do all Muslim women have to undergo the Christian penance of abdicating each & every part of their culture?

JoB – Islam is by far the fastest growing religious group in Europe, and at current rates practising Muslims are set to outnumber Christians who regularly attend church in France , Spain and other countries wihtin 20 years. Not sure what your terms ‘with more/less’ mean, but a guess is you mean political/socio-economic clout. Well perhaps that’s right, but in our new diversity-embracing order, religious freedom is treated as more important than economic welfare. Because it costs a lot less to implement, and also, by its advocacy, governments and the effete do-gooding elite (rather than the effective professional classes, such as teachers, doctors) can pretend to be socially conscious and caring. Meantime, frontline workers, such as police, social workers, see abuses of female rights in urban conurbations that would no longer be tolereated if inflicted on, e.g. Catholic girls. Turn a blind eye if you will, but what other growing religion in northern Europe gets away with the incarceration and murder of its females and calls them ‘honour killings’, and then demands separate courts and even parliaments?

As an inhabitant of Northern Europe I have to still hear the first call for separate courts. I have heard the call for separate executives in religious matters which is a proper call to make given the state has no business in religious matters & Islam has no central authority for these matters. I see it, as it was designed, as a way that will avoid Islam in a country dominated by those that shout loudest.

As to the more/less, I was referring to the amount of Islamists. Strict (in the sense of fundamentalist) interpretration of Islam is not increasing & conversion of non-Islamists is a minor phenomenon. What happens is that the minorities get a larger portion of the airtime & that it is increasingly politically correct to condemn a whole religion (the left interpretation) & the races culturally inclined to follow that religion (the right interpretation) based on those phenomena.

The left & right interpretations converge rapidly it becoming bon ton in Northern Europe to become a right wing intellectual.

“Maybe, specifically in France, it´s just a fashion statement – a head scarf on top of coming in handy can be quite beuatiful you know.”

And maybe it’s not. Coming in handy (for what?) and beautiful are all very well, but the thing is also a symbol and a non-symbolic instrument of subordination and inferiority. It’s no good just pretending that away.

And it’s not a head scarf, either, it’s a hijab. Don’t use euphemisms to try to make your case. Head scarves are what royal women wear to watch horses; the hijab is something else.

“I have heard the call for separate executives in religious matters which is a proper call to make given the state has no business in religious matters & Islam has no central authority for these matters.”

One, that’s just an assertion about the state, and two, surely even that assertion depends on how one defines “religion”. If religion means “the right of men to subordinate, deny rights to, beat, kill, mutilate the genitals of, women” then I say the state has every business in “religion”. To put it another way, the putative right of men and male relatives to abuse and subordinate women as part of their religion conflicts directly with the putative right of women to be treated equally before the law – to have rights in the first place. These conflicts come up in many places – for instance court battles in the US when ‘Christian scientist’ parents refuse medical treatment to their children who then die. It’s not an undisputed fact that religion should be allowed to trump the law, thus it’s not an undisputed fact that the state has no business in religion. On the contrary, it’s highly disputed.

Yes, true, it may be (and as far as I know is) a symbol of a lot of things. But the trouble is, the subordination aspect is there and can’t be left out. Would we think it was a mere fashion statement if black children started wearing leg chains?

There are Jewish cultural practices I’m no fan of; I believe ultra-orthodox women are pretty thoroughly subordinated; but Muslim cultural practices are the ones that are being euphemized or overlooked by well-meaning multiculti types right now, so they’re the ones I’m talking about.

“if you allow hijab wearing muslim women to deide for themselves what it is a symbol for for them.”

What do you mean? I’m not in a position to do anything else. Or by allowing hijab wearing muslim women to decide for themselves, do you mean shut up? Not even criticise the practice? Do you take writing an opinion to be interfering with the ability of hijab wearing muslim women to decide for themselves? Surely not – at that rate nothing would ever change or reform or even be thought about.

“(Obviously they might be doing it in their own non-public sphere which would be quite despicable but another matter alltogether)”

I don’t think it is another matter altogether. I don’t think abuse is okie dokie just because it takes place within the sacred “family”. I think it’s very dodgy to claim that people have rights in the public sphere that they give up in the private one. I think there have to be limits to what people can do to each other even behind closed doors and with a marriage license.

Call me a multiculti type anytime you want but I’m not euphemizing anything. I´m just pointing out that the articles quoted are, to say the least, not telling the complete story & that the solutions of taking away all muslim cultural practices isn’ quite a solution. For the remainder I only hope it won’t be long before it’s a non-issue just because there’s no longer a higher percentage of women abuse or inferiority in muslim cultures with respect to others.

Let them make an issue out of it – w/o seizing on any muslim woman that calls it a disgrace as “the only one” that’s succeeded of getting rid of the leg chains.

But obviously there should be limits, I did not even come close to implying the opposite. Luckily there ARE limits such that we don’t need to confound “private crimes” with all muslim bodies that are somehow including criminals.

By that standard, each secular state is at risk of being invaded by every other secular state – all having criminals in their “flock”.

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Insisting that Islam is the problem, to the extent that people confessing to be muslims are suspect is blowing this out of proportion.

It’s a rather retarded religion amongst many retarded religions that happens to be used as a slogan more lately.

Yes, leg chains. Not because they’re an exact equivalent, but because both are (among other things) decided physical visible conspicuous badges of subordination. That’s why it seems to me at least evasive to pretend that either one can be a fashion statement and nothing else. If so many women hadn’t been beaten and whipped (and worse) for failing to ‘cover themselves’ in Iran and Afghanistan over the last couple of decades, it might be different, but they were.

But, again, that’s not an issue. No one (as far as I know anyway) is advocating “taking away” all muslim cultural practices. But arguing that some of them are bad is an entirely different thing. It’s persuasion, not “taking away”.

“It’s a rather retarded religion amongst many retarded religions”

Well, it has some features that are even worse than other retarded religions, which matters because those features are written into law in some countries. Rape law for example.

“Insisting that Islam is the problem, to the extent that people confessing to be muslims are suspect”

Yeah but Islam is one thing and Muslims are another. Similar with Christians and Jews. There is a lot of horrendous crap in the Bible, obviously, but fortunately one can assume that not all Christians accept or even know about them. I hope (though the hope may be more pirous than realistic, I don’t know) the same is true of many Muslims – that they simply quietly overlook the more horrendous bits of the Koran.

But not wanting to gang up on Muslims (which I certainly don’t, I agree with you there, obviously) can’t mean giving Islam a blank cheque. It can’t mean simply taking it on faith that Islam is no more oppressive or unjust than any other religion. If it is, it is.

I think you see the difference between leg chains & hijabs. But as to the similarity, I’d be nonplussed if some African American wore pretend leg chains to make a point.

I see how one can argue that it is bad too be subordinized & insofar the hijab is the sign of subordination that one should have the option not to wear it. But one has the option, & one sometimes does not even have another option (e.g. in France) so where’s the beef. After all France is not Iran, or Afghanistan.

Well, I really don’t know. You’re making a political point here. The Koran is, in good revealed religion tradition, rather self-contradicting enough not to suffice for the qualification “most retarded”.

“Yeah but Islam is one thing and Muslims are another. Similar with Christians and Jews.”

After which you continue that the former are somehow more suspect than the latter (the evidence that they overlook it is – by the way – overwhelming as not a single stoning has taken place here in more than 4 decades of immigration).

I don´t give anything a blank cheque but I do give anybody a blank cheque – until proven they don’ deserve it – so high is my admiration for our type of state (and believe you me, I´d support invading the Saudis, all guns blazing)

“After which you continue that the former are somehow more suspect than the latter”

True. Fair point. It’s just that I don’t know how much leeway Muslims feel that they have, to ignore bits of the Koran. Christians at least in the US feel they have pretty much unlimited leeway.

“But one has the option, & one sometimes does not even have another option”

But one doesn’t always have the option. That’s part of the issue, of course. Wearing the hijab is sometimes voluntary, but it often is not; and even when it is, it is often the product of indoctrination (in implicit inferiority, don’t forget) starting in early childhood. Read Maryam Namzie on this stuff, for one.

And where the beef is, is that the hijab is a problem in schools, for a lot of reasons. Problems for Muslim girls who don’t want to wear it, for one thing. It’s a huge problem for teachers, for another (there are fights among students, for instance). We have a lot of articles on the subject here.

Well some more than others (as with “born again” & “liberal” Christians, I suppose).

But I’m not denying it isn’t a problem. I merely believe that attacking the symbols isn’t going to solve that problem.

I also happen to believe it isn’t an easy problem to solve. I mean, the practice of hitting children isn’t easy to solve – as in many cases there’s nothing wrong with it, even if in some cases it is horribly wrong – & I see nobody suggesting anymore that we should just ban every occurrence of it.

I hadn’t the remotest intention of offering the piece as any kind of ‘scientific’ verification of anything, it does however offer some evidence of Sharia courts operation in the UK, which was in dispute.. I also snuck it in because it offers examples of the way in which this – ahem – trend – strips Islamic women of basic individual rights that citizens of the UK are entitled to under our laws. If the Moonies did this, we would be stomping them, and rightly so…

True – but some feel so guilty about them having ignored it that they feel the need for doing penance at the expense of those they spared initially.

Personally – I never understood why being poorer was an excuse for more criminality (both are factual). I can see correlation but I cannot see how correlation can lead to an excuse for anybody. Sure, let us go make less poverty but, in the meantime, I think stuff should happen regardless.

No doubt. But there are still plenty ignoring it, so it’s still worth pointing it out. People like Maryam Namazie and Azar Majedi and Ibn Warraq should be writing for the Guardian, for instance, but they’re not, presumably because the Guardian doesn’t invite them. Their views are not widely heard – so it’s still worth pointing these things out. I think.

The great Senegalese director Ousmane Sembene has put out a new film titled “Moolaade”, about a heroic Burkina-Faso woman who protects young village girls from genital mutilation. I haven’t seen it yet, but I’m a great admirer of Sembene’s previous films (especially “Guelwaar”). Allah only knows how much distribution “Moolaade” will get, if it gets any at all, but you might keep an eye peeled for it at your local arthouse theater, if any still survive in your town.